Social Media

Is The Listener License Coming?

One of the folks I've had the good fortune of being loosely associated with over the years, thanks to my work with Art Lindsey, is RantMedia's Sean Kennedy. Sean is an intensely creative individual, as well as the focal point of a fair deal of controversy. This comes largely as a result of his extreme willingness to speak his mind at the drop of a hat. Sean could best be described, I think, as a sub-culture enthusiast and post-humanism journalist. For years he's been making reference to something he's referred to in both dark future science fiction as well as his weekly rants on science news as the Listener's License.

The best I can determine from what I know of Kennedy's body of work, the concept was first termed into being in his brilliant audio drama series Tales from the Afternow, a dark future audio drama portraying a post apocalyptic Earth ruled by roving gangs and mega-corporations. The concept he describes in the series, though, is based on what he sees as the growing grasps for control of media by the big nine media conglomerates in America, and their politicians in the various governments of the world. Listening to the series, it is clear that Sean is envisioning what may certainly be called a worst-case scenario, where your Listener's License not only serves as the enabler to participate in creation and enjoyment of any type of media, but as your primary source of identification in the information (and post-information) age.

There's Good News and Bad NewsThere has been a natural ebb and flow to the nature of intellectual property as the RIAA and the MPAA wage their war on 12 year olds. On the one hand, there are more and more victories in terms of those creating the art bucking the system. People like Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Madonna, and all ten gazillion independent artists on MySpace, Last.FM, PodSafe and Garageband.

Now the MPAA has created a very invasive piece of software designed to target illegal copyrighted materials on a university's network and servers, a release that very suspiciously coincides with the proposed legislation currently before Congress. I've got good money that should the Federally mandated copyright enforcement become law, a mandate to use this MPAA software (that, incidentally, opens up the entire university's private data to the MPAA) will be soon to follow.

I promise you, I don't wear a tin-foil hat to bed, and I don't see black helicopters fly over my apartment. It is just that I'm starting to see signs of misinformed, yet bought and paid-for governments make all the wrong decisions when it comes to how we use our media. Unfortunately, we who sit in the lauded halls of the bloggerati (yes, you reading this blog post right now) are in the minority when it comes to understanding the implications of these decisions (and even we don't agree 100% on all their ramifications).

Here's a couple things I do know, though:

When the Government gets involved with enforcement of civil technology and intellectual property laws, things get FUBARed.If the sad saga of Vonage has taught us anything at all, it is that America's patent system is horribly broken. Despite what you may think of the company or the service, anyone with an inkling of knowledge when it comes to telecom can tell you that all the patent lawsuits brought against Vonage are completely baseless. Unfortunately our government doesn't know this, and Vonage is about to pay the ultimate price. Similarly, Amazon's ridiculous patent on One-Click technology took literally years to overturn, but the damage to technology advancement and e-commerce had already been done.

And let's not get started on the Computer Decency Act, the PATRIOT ACT, or any other number of mangled and malformed technology rights-infringing laws of late. The bottom line is that the US government, nor many others around the world do technology any favors when they pass a relevant law.

Anti-Consumerist corporate behavior is in its death throes, yet one success by the media mega-corporations could erase all that progress.Obviously, we're looking at the beginning of the end for the big media company's ignorance of the power of New Media. All creative efforts by the big nine are presently at a halt over a strike concerning that very topic. Warner Brother's CEO recently admitted that going to war with their customers was probably a bad idea. Major artists are leaving big media and experimenting with social media in droves now.

Just because artists go independent won't make them safe from a far reaching copyright enforcement law, however. The RIAA considers all forms of music under the jurisdiction of their organization, regardless of whether or not they're represented by a label from within their organization, and will collect royalties on their behalf. With the MPAA being as joined at the hip with the RIAA as it is, do you think that they'd be far from doing the same if they had the full weight and enforcement capabilities of the world's government behind them? How safe do you think UGC YouTube content would be at that point?

What do we do?Going back to Kennedy's dark future, where omnipotent corporations roam the Earth, dominating all its inhabitants and their ability to create and consume media, I don't think it is an inevitable certainty that we might end up in that scenario. Now, more than ever, I do think that it is plausible. I also believe strongly that we're at a point where we can abolish (or at least significantly reduce) the possibility of it coming into reality.

I'm not here to be an activist, and I'm not trying to shill for a particular non-profit that I think is going to end this sort of legal abuse of humans trying to communicate, either artistically or otherwise. I think, though that we are at the dawn of a new age where everyone is not only a consumer of media from creators big and small, but also creators themselves. Right now is a pivotal point where we can either take ownership of what we create and consume, or see that ownership taken away from us by either corporations or governments acting on behalf of them.

We're at a point where not only intellectual property ownership rights are in play, but the political climates of our respective nations are in flux as well. If there ever were at time to be vigilant and on top of these sorts of intellectual property ownership issues, that time is now.

What's Hot

More in Social Media

What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot

Mashable
is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 42 million unique visitors worldwide and 21 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.